TOPEKA — The Kansas Supreme Court reversed a decision of the Kansas Court of Appeals in a protracted land dispute involving state Sen. Dennis Pyle and a neighboring farmer that pivoted on access to crop fields in northeast Kansas.
The case pitted Pyle against neighbor James Gall Jr., who didn’t want Pyle driving farm equipment and other vehicles across a thin strip of the Galls’ land to access a field owned by Pyle. Pyle has served in the Senate since 2005, was stripped of committee assignments in 2022 for not voting for the GOP majority’s redistricting map and mounted an unsuccessful independent campaign for governor in November.
Pyle prevailed in the district court and with the panel of judges on the Court of Appeals in 2022 on his request for title to a piece of boundary land that had been claimed by the Pyles and Galls. The Gall family had attempted to thwart Pyle from reaching his tiny field by building a fence 20 feet beyond the traditional dividing line and by directing Pyle to stop driving on their property. Those actions led to the lawsuit filed in district court.
The Supreme Court decision issued July 7 didn’t alter the lower court decisions establishing Pyle acquired the disputed land by adverse possession.
The Supreme Court did decide the question of whether Pyle had an easement over a 60-foot strip of Gall land for the purpose of reaching a nearly 2-acre piece of Pyle property separated from his other holdings by Walnut Creek. The district court said Pyle could legally traverse the strip to plant and harvest crops, but the Court of Appeals disagreed because Pyle hadn’t demonstrated exclusive use of the corridor leading to his tiny field in Brown County.
Justices of the Supreme Court decided Pyle had established the legal right to cross the neighbor’s land and overturned that portion of the Court of Appeals’ decision.
In the opinion by Justice Evelyn Wilson affirming the district court’s perspective, she wrote Pyle had openly established an easement over the years by continuously using the Galls’ land for “a unique purpose over a set prescriptive period.” It’s significant the Galls waited many years before trying to stop the Pyles from using the access point.
Wilson said the Supreme Court was interested in the case because over the past 50 years or so the legal basis of a prescriptive easement had become blended with definitions of adverse possession, which was a related but distinct doctrine of property law. For example, the Court of Appeals issued conflicting opinions on this type of easement within a five-year period.
The idea embraced by the Supreme Court was that exclusive use of a prescriptive easement didn’t mean the property wasn’t accessible to other people. Instead, the Supreme Court’s preferred test was tied to whether the general public was forbidden from using the easement. In this case, Pyle used the easement exclusively for farming. The Galls had allowed usage of the access point for people engaged in farming, hunting or fishing on their own fields.
“Importantly, the Pyles’ use of the land was unique to them,” the Supreme Court said. “Moreover, no one else had a similar right to use the Galls’ land as a corridor to the (Pyle) field.”
